(And) see the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
(I can) hear the undertaker’s bell
(Yeah), nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There’s a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There’s a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Perhaps, but blind artists, of course, have also achieved prominence in other artistic endeavors. Homer, the poet who composed The Iliad and The Odyssey, was said to have been blind; some scholars believe he carried the entirety of his epic poems in his head, ready to be recited. A modern-day heir to Homer, James Joyce, author of Ulysses, also suffered from severe visual impairment, as did writers James Thurber and Aldous Huxley. Huxley, in fact, believed that will and imagination could improve impaired vision and wrote in his book The Art of Seeing, “For the person whose sight is subnormal, the correct mental attitude may be expressed in some words as these. ‘I know theoretically that defective vision can be improved. I feel certain that, if I learn the art of seeing, I can improve my own defective vision.’“
Jefferson—whose given name was Lemmon, according to census records—was born on September 24, 1893, in Couchman, a small community about seventy miles south of Dallas. (His birth date is sometimes listed, less reliably, as July 11, 1897.) His parents, Alec and Classie Jefferson, worked as sharecroppers at a farm in town. Jefferson had six siblings; his brother John died around 1907 when he fell under the wheels of a slow-moving train. It is widely assumed that Jefferson was born without sight, but there are no medical records to support that. The only known official source that confirms his disability is the 1900 census, where he is registered as BS, which stands for “blind son.” His family was active in the Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church. Locals recall that Jefferson’s mother had a strong voice and would sing regularly at Shiloh and other churches in the region. Jefferson evidently mastered the guitar as a teenager and soon began traveling into the nearby town of Wortham, playing in front of local businesses for shoppers and passersby. He would sit on a bench and place a tin cup nearby for tips (others say he used a hat) and play sometimes until 1 a.m. before walking back home to Couchman.
Jefferson was a solidly built man who stood five feet eight inches tall and, according to various sources, weighed somewhere between 180 and 250 pounds. At one point, in order to make ends meet, Jefferson briefly had a stint as a professional wrestler. Samuel Charters, who interviewed some of Jefferson’s family members in the 1950s, wrote that Jefferson “wrestled for money in Dallas theatres. Since he was blind, he could be billed as a novelty wrestler. He weighed nearly 250 pounds, so he was never hurt, but it was a rough way to make a living. As soon as he started making a little money singing, he left the theatres.”
Jefferson was usually nattily dressed, typically in a Stetson hat and a blue serge suit; he was also occasionally seen smoking cigars. He was tight with his money and, according to one report, wired his tin cup to the neck of his guitar. He would sing at Saturday night parties where revelers would dance the Black Bottom, the Charleston, the two-step, and the Buck Dance and drink corn whiskey, beer, and homemade wine. Although the parties often got wild, according to one observer, nobody ever saw Jefferson get drunk. When he played, he was known to sweat profusely; he would often crack jokes, and although he played the blues, he never seemed to get depressed or melancholic. When people shouted out requests, he would tell them, “Just wait awhile. Hold your cool.”
A Wortham native, Arthur Carter, later recalled seeing Jefferson perform at a picnic near town. At the gathering, a dispute arose between Jefferson and a Holiness preacher who argued that singing the blues was a sinful act. Jefferson waited until the preacher’s sermon had reached its climax and made his move. He started to play his guitar and sing. The crowd left the preacher and came to hear Jefferson. It was as if Jefferson was saying, through his music, that his work had to be touched by God because it clearly had a pull over the faithful.
Indeed, Jefferson’s playing was something that was almost supernatural. Fellow bluesman Tom Shaw, who followed Jefferson around in the 1920s in the Dallas area, once said this about him, “Lemon was strictly a bluesman… He was the king. Wherever he pull his guitar out, he was the king there. Wasn’t no use for anybody else to come up talkin’ about playin’ against him, ‘cause they couldn’t even do what he was doin’—all they could do was look and wonder how in the hell he done it.”
Jefferson’s music found an audience, and he became perhaps the most popular bluesman of his era. His itinerant ways—he traveled to many of the small towns around East Texas, including Wortham, Kirvin, and Groesbeck—did much to popularize and romanticize the image of the blind blues musician. Later, when Jefferson moved to Chicago and began to record, he allowed himself one extravagance: He acquired a $725 Ford automobile for which he hired a chauffeur.
Jefferson brought the sound of the street corner to the whole world. Before him, blues players had mostly come from the musical theater. Jefferson made rich, variegated music that was made to be belted out over the sound of passing pedestrians, trotting horses, market conversation—it was music that could compete with life itself. He could play dance music, but the Jefferson songs that survive on record aren’t party tunes. He would often break away from the main rhythm of a song with his guitar and contrast his vocal lines with spontaneous guitar riffs. He was perhaps the most adept guitarist of his time, and his instrument could sing, howl, keep time, whisper, or clang like a church bell. While other street singers were content to holler out songs about their poverty that aimed for cheap sympathy, Jefferson’s songs were about a wide range of subjects and employed sly metaphors. “That Black Snake Moan” and “Hot Dogs Blues” were playfully sexual. “ ‘Lectric Chair Blues,” “Wartime Blues,” and “One Dime Blues” could be read as early songs of social protest. “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” captures something timeless and existential: the fear that all people have about what will be their posthumous legacy and the wish to have it preserved.
There are many questions about the circumstances of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s death. When did he die? Most accounts put it in December 1929, but some say he may have perished as late as February 1930. How did he die? One account says he was mugged and left to freeze to death. Son House believed Jefferson was killed in a car crash. Another theory is that Jefferson died of a heart attack. One of his producers, Mayo Williams, said he heard that Jefferson collapsed in his car and was abandoned by his chauffeur. But many, if not most, chroniclers say Jefferson froze to death in a Chicago blizzard, unable to find his way to safety because of his blindness.
But Blind Lemon Jefferson, as it turns out, may not have been so blind. In one of only two known pictures of Jefferson, he is shown holding a guitar and wearing a suit jacket, a polka-dot tie, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. His eyes are shut. It is not known why a man who was supposed to be blind was sporting a pair of glasses. In the other known photo of Jefferson, he is wearing a different pair of glasses. A number of musicians, including T-Bone Walker, Josh While, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Lead Belly, claimed to have helped lead Jefferson through the streets from place to place, but there are other accounts of Jefferson finding his way around by himself. He also seemed to have a way of identifying the denominations of bills: Once, when he was loaned a one-dollar bill, instead of the five-dollar bill he’d
requested, he complained. He would often tell those who slipped money into his cup or hat, “Don’t play me cheap.” If they threw in a penny, he could tell, perhaps because of the sound, and he would toss the offending coin back out. Jefferson was also said to carry a loaded six-shooter—another suggestion that he at least had sight enough to see where to shoot.
Luigi Monge, a freelance teacher and translator in Genoa, Italy, analyzed all of Jefferson’s known compositions and published the results in the spring 2000 edition of the Black Music Research Journal. Monge’s research found that “no fewer than 241 direct or indirect visual references expressed in the first, second, or third person, or inferable from the context, are spread over Jefferson’s currently available ninety-seven original recordings, alternate takes included. Only seven compositions have no visual references whatsoever.” Examples include “She’s a fine-looking fair brown” and “one train left the depot with a red and blue light behind/Well, the blue light’s the blues, the red light’s a worried mind.” Others deal directly with vision: “We’ll be seldom seen,” “I’ve got your picture, and I’m going to put it in a frame,” and “Some of the finest young women that a man most ever seen.”
Do the visual references in Jefferson’s songs suggest he had the ability to see, or were they simply figures of speech? Monge’s research indicates that Jefferson not only has more visual references per song than such visually impaired musicians as Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller (though a similar number to those in the songs of Blind Willie McTell) but he also has twice as many such references than sighted contemporaries like Charley Patton. Was Jefferson’s blindness part of his act? Perhaps imagining vision in song was his way of compensating for what he lacked in reality. With his blues songs, Jefferson created a whole new world, one that could be envisioned but not seen, one with a rhythm but not necessarily a dance beat, one that was created to earn a living but that was bigger than life. In his music, Jefferson could see more clearly than even his fellow blues greats. He may have lost his way in the Windy City, but he never lost his way with his instrument. Legend has it that Jefferson was found dead with his hand frozen in place around the neck of his guitar.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING:
Blind Lemon Jefferson, The Best of Blind Lemon Jefferson (Yazoo, 2000). A fine survey of his best work.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Texas Blues (Arhoolie, 1990). Hopkins was a former escort of Jefferson’s and was influenced by his work.
Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1962). Features perhaps the best cover of Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.”
The Beatles, Past Masters, Vol. I (Capitol, 1988). Early material from the Fab Four, including a rocking rendition of Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox,” which was his version of Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues.”
Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York (Geffen, 1994). Jefferson influenced Lead Belly, who inspired Kurt Cobain’s take on “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” a.k.a. “In the Pines.”
LOCATING LIGHTNIN’
By Samuel Charters
[From The Country Blues, 1959]
In a poor, shabby room in the colored section of Houston, a thin, worn man sat holding a guitar, playing a little on the strings, looking out of the window. It was a dull winter day, a heavy wind swirling the dust across the yard. There was a railroad behind the houses, and a few children were playing on the rails, shivering in their thin coats.
“There’s a song my cousin learned when he was out on the farm.” He was talking partly to me and partly to a friend of his, sitting in the shadows behind him. “Smokey Hogg got a little of it, but there hasn’t been nobody done it right.” Then he began singing:
You ought to been on the
Brazos in 1910, Bud Russell drove pretty
women like he done ugly
men.
He was singing one of the most famous work songs of the Texas penitentiary farms, “Ain’t No More Cane on This Brazos.” His eyes were closed, he was singing quietly:
My mama called me,
I answered, “Mam?”
She said, “Son, you tired of working?”
I said, “Mama, I sure am.”
He sat a moment, thinking of the hot, dusty summers on the flat cotton lands along the Brazos River, thinking of the convict gangs singing as they worked, the guards circling them slowly, a shotgun across the saddle.
You ought to been on the Brazos in 1904,
You could find a dead man on every turnin’ row.
He shook his head; then he began to sing parts of the song again, playing his guitar a little. He stopped to drink some gin out of a bottle under the chair. He drank nearly a half pint of raw gin, using the metal cap of the bottle for a glass. His friend looked over and smiled, “He’s getting it now.” The singer went over two or three runs on the guitar; then he nodded and began singing:
Uumh, big Brazos, here I come,
Uumh, big Brazos, here I come.
It’ hard doing time for another man
When there ain’t a thing poor Lightnin’ done…
Uumh, big Brazos, oh lord yes, here I come.
Figure on doing time for someone else,
When there ain’t a thing poor Lightnin’ done.
My mama called me, I answered, “Mam?”
She said, “Son, you tired of workin’?”
I said, “Mama, I sure am.”
My Pappa called me, I answered, “Sir?”
“If you’re tired of workin’
What the hell you going to stay here for?”
I couldn’t … uumh …
I just couldn’t help myself.
You know a man can’t help but feel bad,
When he’s doing time for someone else.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1965
The man was named Lightnin’ Hopkins, from outside of Centerville, Texas. “Ain’t No More Cane on This Brazos” was a song he had heard when he was a young man, working in the fields. His own song was a reshaping and reworking of the old work song into something intensely personal and expressive: He had changed it into a blues.
HENRY THOMAS: OUR DEEPEST LOOK AT THE ROOTS
By Mack McCormick
[From the notes to Henry Thomas “Ragtime Texas”: Complete Recorded Works 1927-1929, 1974]
It was one of those bright winter afternoons in 1949. I was standing on a corner in downtown Houston, waiting for a signal light to change, when I noticed an old man with a guitar making his way along the opposite sidewalk. He was a formidable person, a bulky figure with a mashed hat who moved in a straight line through the crowd. People looked up at him, then gave him a quick second look and moved out of his path.
Whatever errand I was on was put aside and I set out after him, catching up to him at the corner of Crawford and Capitol. I had to call out to him twice to catch his attention. He stopped and swung around to face me, the guitar held tight across his chest, a dusty mountain of a man. He must have stood all of six feet three and the size of him was made all the greater by the enormous quantity of clothes in which he was wrapped. There were three overcoats, one on top of the other, all unbuttoned and flapping open in a chilly wind that gusted down the street. The outer coat was streaked with mud and grease. The inner garments were worn smooth with wear and brushing. Later, when a question sent him in search of some item, he roamed through all the different pockets like a man searching the closets and drawers of his house.
He was a street singer, perhaps a beggar, but there was nothing deferential about him. He first grumbled at me in a coarse voice and seemed about to brush on past. Then he paused and broke into a surprisingly bright smile. Many of his teeth were missing and it was difficult to understand what he said. Only here and there a few words came through gruffly. He did make me understand that he’d arrived in Houston on a train that had pulled into Union Station only a few minutes earlier. He said he’d slept under a bridge in Palestine, Texas, the night before.
He agreed to play some music but what followed was a disap
pointment. His guitar strings were dead and terribly out of tune. He flailed away at them almost indifferently, as if he’d lost the ability to discriminate tones. His voice had a gay lilt but only occasionally could a phrase be made out. Nonetheless, there was a compelling vigor in his performance. He used a flat metal, kazoo-like instrument that he gripped in his mouth and blew, getting a curious buzzing sound from it—a sound with an energetic bite that carried up and down the sidewalk. He went through several pieces there on the street corner, at one point gathering a small crowd of pedestrians who tossed some coins in the mashed felt hat he’d set on the sidewalk.
I’d come across him a few years too late. He was far too old to be hoboing and sleeping under bridges. He was too old to be able to perform effectively. One could only wonder what he had sounded like before old age had worn him down.
Over the years a number of things have come along to suggest that the man on the street was in fact “Ragtime Texas” Henry Thomas. Harry Smith’s somewhat madcap collection of old 78s, Anthology of American Folk Music, contained two items recorded in 1928 by a man named Henry Thomas, a fascinating performer who seemed to have a wealth of music at his command; an artist who offered a deep look at the black tradition that had taken shape in the nineteenth century. By the time these records came to my notice in the early 1950s, I’d forgotten the name of the man I’d heard on the street. I had some vague recollection that he’d claimed to have made some records and that I’d even found them listed in Index to Jazz. Much clearer is the memory of that gruff, towering man telling me he came from East Texas and bristling with pride when he said, “I left out from home when I was eleven years old and I been traveling ever since.”
There are a striking number of similarities between the “Ragtime Texas” recordings and the man I’d stopped. Apart from the obvious Texas connections, there is the fact that both relied heavily on D-formation chords and made unusual use of the capo, pushing it three to seven frets up the neck of the guitar. They were unquestionably men of the same age and period, and there is a blunt heartiness in these records that is wholly consistent with and even suggests that dusty mountain of a man who’d played on the street corner that winter afternoon.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 25